Menu

rebecca horn’s ‘finger gloves’

Rebecca Horn‘s Finger Gloves, from 1974. I’ve included a video of the gloves in action below; you only need to watch the beginning to get a sense for how they work.

In Barcelona as a young artist in the early 1960s, Horn was working with glass fiber without a mask. Unaware of any harm, Horn used the material routinely before becoming very ill. She spent a year recovering in a sanatorium, and it was in her hospital bed that she began to make body-centric sculptures. Here, the gloves extend and alter the normal sense of touch: sensation is mediated, but available in ways it wouldn’t otherwise be.

Horn’s work has been wide-ranging since this project, but I keep coming back to its elegance and provocation—both distancing and intimate at the same time.

Abler was run by Sara Hendren between 2009 and 2017. I tracked and commented on art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, the future of human bodies in the built environment, and related ideas.

It was a time when discussions on the web weren't yet entirely dominated by social media, and it was an exciting moment to be blogging—putting together unlikely bedfellows next to one another, magazine-style, to see what sense could be made by thinking aloud, together. I was writing about prosthetics in the ordinary sense, but also about assistive technologies in the far less ordinary sense: low tech tools, hybrid technologies, art works, and more. The ideas were associatively connected, restless with questions. And all of it, in retrospect, was a platform, a runway for me to write myself into a mode of working as a design researcher and artist.

You can see some of my current and ongoing projects—making, writing, speaking, and even, yes, still blogging—here.

I tweet. You can use this site by going straight to the archives for past posts, or you can use the guide here on the home page.